Review

Mindhunter Review: An Appealingly Repulsing Serial Killer Study

CBS’s long-running procedural Criminal Minds chronicles the grim exploits of the F.B.I.’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, giving us a gruesome murder a week (well, it’s usually a murder—and sometimes it’s not just one) as highly skilled agents craft a psychological profile of the unknown subject—an “unsub”—to crack the case. The show, being a CBS procedural, is often witless and goofy, unrelentingly dark as it is. (The writing team has to come up with more and more elaborate ways for a person to die with each new episode—a pile of bodies now stacked up 13 seasons high.) A lot of its whizzing technical talk—the credulous way these profilers rely on what seem like a lot of broad inferences and guesswork—gives Criminal Minds a strong whiff of make-believe. Wouldn’t it be nice if these techniques were applicable in real-world crime-solving?

Actually, they kind of are. Clunky as Criminal Minds may be, it is based, at least loosely, in real criminal psychology developed by the F.B.I. in the late 1970s. Serial killing has consumed so much space in the American cultural interest in the past few decades that it’s easy to forget that the terminology and methodology surrounding the phenomenon were invented only fairly recently. Netflix’s new series Mindhunter, which debuted on the streaming service on October 13, is an effort to educate us about that history, giving us something of an origin story for all the serial killer enthusiasm that’s come since—from The Silence of the Lambs to Seven to season after season of Criminal Minds.

You may ask yourself why anyone would want to wade into that horrifying subject matter for 10 hours, as Season 1 of Mindhunter asks us to do. But creator Joe Penhall and his team of writers and directors—including Seven director David Fincher—make a compelling case, satisfying the curious, prurient interest so many of us have, shamefully or not, about the ghastly business of serial killing while also offering up some sympathetic human drama. Mindhunter is a show about process and, to some extent, science, about how researchers and investigators began to deepen and complicate their, and thus our own, concepts of criminal pathology. The show is interesting enough on those merits. But it’s also about something more ineffable: the way we are drawn to the dark, captivated, haunted, teased by the lurid and unthinkable. Maybe the show is profiling us, as well.

Mindhunter does a lot to immerse us, and little to put us at ease. Our two leads, a hungry young F.B.I. agent and his surly older partner, are played by Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany. They’re not the biggest stars in the world, but they are recognizable enough actors from television. They’re joined in later episodes by former Fringe star Anna Torv, as a Harvard professor-turned-collaborator. Beyond that, though, with a few minor exceptions, the cast of Mindhunter—the array of killers and victims and collateral damage surveyed throughout—is comprised of actors whose work I’m not familiar with. They’re almost all terrific, and they seem unique to the gray, morbid world of this show. Which offers us little room for escape, to remind ourselves that we’ve seen this actor in that thing, making it more difficult to put Mindhunter’s parade of terror and despair at a distance.

This isn’t to suggest that watching the show is all a macabre, oppressive slog. Yes, it can be pretty gnarly in its close-ups of crime scene photos and elaborate descriptions of acts perpetrated by the likes of Ed Kemper (a terrifically unnerving Cameron Britton). But most of the show is alert, talky, theoretical. It’s an engaging workplace drama of sorts, just one that happens to be about people interviewing serial killers to find out what kind of logic, if any, governs them. Groff’s Holden Ford—based on John E. Douglas—is one of the first people at the agency to see the potential benefits of engaging with these troubled minds. McCallany’s reluctant Bill Tench—based on Robert Ressler—slowly comes around to Ford’s side, and the two set off on the road to delve into the black. Ford can do little to temper, or hide, his excitement, while Tench remains off-put, repulsed, but resolute in doing the work because he knows it could help in some way.

So the audience is given some balance, confronted with our own giddy interest while also provided with a tether back to the moral, compassionate world. Groff and McCallany play these two sides adeptly, neither, respectively, becoming a caricature of dispassionate obsession nor gruff, traditional decency. They’re people, much as their subjects are people, and those subjects’ victims are as well. That’s an unsettling reality to dwell in for a full season of television—a realm not of monsters but humans, where a few act out terribly for disturbingly intangible reasons. But as the show argues, it’s in drawing psychopathy closer to us that we come to better understand it. That can come at an emotional cost, of course, a fact Mindhunter illustrates as the season goes on.

Mindhunter is careful not to become Criminal Minds; there is not a convenient new case to be solved every episode. But there are a few investigative digressions peppered throughout the season, as Ford and Tench act as consultants to local law enforcement stymied by sad, tricky cases. These mini-mysteries are done as carefully and intricately as the larger narrative, lending a sensitivity to proceedings that could have instead been a rote plugging-in of lessons the two agents have learned in their interviews. There are no neat analogs or connections, no witty little parallels. It’s all just a vast, dank basement of human thought and action, one that, as their eyes adjust, Ford and Tench are better able to navigate.

There are some moments when the show’s writing is stilted, particularly in scenes between Ford and his sociology student girlfriend, Debbie (Hannah Gross). In these scenes, we get to learn plenty about Ford and his own relatively unfeeling, analytical brain; there are times when he’s as placidly blunt and manipulative as Kemper. But Debbie remains a cipher and, increasingly, serves as little more than a needy obstacle in Ford’s path to further enlightenment. There is also some expositional writing that is too rushed and tidy, like the scene in which “serial killer” is first suggested as an umbrella term for this newly classified forensic diagnosis. Sometimes the show doesn’t seem to trust that we’re following its thinking, so it dumbs itself down. (Not that it’s so highfalutin to begin with, frankly.) For the most part, though, Mindhunter’s writing is quick, clever, and engrossing, whether the team is prying open a murderer’s head or getting chewed out by the F.B.I. brass. (Which happens a lot.)

The series also looks terrific. Fincher sets the visual tone with its first two episodes, his familiar glossy blacks and forbidding earth tones ushering us into a drab late-70s world of dingy towns and smoky rooms. But the show really finds its aesthetic and creative groove in Episode 3, when director Asif Kapadia steps in, infusing things with some pep, a little zip that is necessary to traverse through all this heavy muck.

Mindhunter is one of Netflix’s most artful, substantial series. It’s got none of the cheap, dreary quality of the streaming service’s various Marvel properties, nor does it traffic in the meandering, wheel-spinning storytelling of some prestige-y titles that are better as premises than actual shows. As an elevated, intellectual crime procedural, Mindhunter works quite well. It indulges a perhaps uniquely American fascination while also attempting to explain it, rescuing the series from simply being yet another leering bit of murder exploitation. Perhaps when Mindhunter’s run has ended, we’ll have some better conception of why we watch all the brutal stuff that we do. Better yet, maybe we’ll be cured of the compulsion.